"It is time
for our culture to start seeing more value in living beings,
whether gorillas or humans, than in our disposable high-tech
gadgets such as cell phones. It is time to steal back a more
compassionate existence from the corporate plutocracy that
creates destructive markets and from the media system that has
manufactured our consent.

"It is
not just a question of giving up cell phones (though that would
be a great start). We must question the appropriation of our
planet in the form of a resource to be consumed, rather than as
a home and community to be lived in."

24
Dec 2007 After the United States has spent more than
$5 billion
in a largely failed effort to bolster the Pakistani military effort
against 'Al Qaeda' and the Taliban, some American officials now
acknowledge that there were too few controls over the money.
American money was has been diverted to help finance weapons systems
designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the
officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of
millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for
fuel, ammunition and other costs. [Another $5 billion goes the
way of Project Bioshield, down the toilet and into the hands of
Bush's corpora-terrorists.

Meanwhile:
Medicaid Funding for Schools Cut23 Dec 2007 The Bush regime
yesterday eliminated about $700 million a year in Medicaid
reimbursements to schools, sidestepping an attempt by Congress to
block such a move.

PLUTOCRACY

Bush's
Class Warfare

By Peter Dreier

Just
a week before Christmas, President Bush gave corporate America two
big presents. On Tuesday, his Federal Communications Commission
changed the rules to allow the nation's giant conglomerates to
further consolidate their grip on the media by permitting them to
purchase TV and radio stations in the same local markets where they
already own daily newspapers. As a gift to the country's automobile
industry, Bush's Environmental Protection Agency ruled Wednesday,
over the objections of the agency's staff, that California, the
nation's largest and most polluted state, and 16 other states, can't
impose regulations to limit greenhouse gases from cars and trucks
that are stronger than the federal government's own weak standards.

"Corporate Globalization" is Both Imbalancing the World and
Destroying the Environment

"The North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) flooded Mexico with cheap subsidized US
agricultural products that displaced millions of Mexican farmers.
Between 2000 and 2005, Mexico lost 900,000 rural jobs and 700,000
industrial jobs, resulting in deep unemployment throughout the
country. Desperate poverty has forced millions of Mexican workers
north in order to feed their families.

"The National Campesino Front estimates that two million farmers
have been displaced by NAFTA, in many cases related to the increase
in US imports. In 1994, the first year of the agreement, the United
States exported $4.59 billion of agricultural products to Mexico,
according to the Department of Agriculture. By 2006 the figure had
risen to $9.85 billion—an increase of 114 percent. US exports of
corn, Mexico’s staple crop and largest source of rural employment,
alone doubled to over $2.5 billion in 2006.

"This combination of unemployment in Mexico, the huge gap between
salaries in the United States and Mexico, and US demand for cheap
labor to compete on global markets has created the current
situation. The demand for undocumented labor in the US economy is
structural. It is not just a few companies seeking to cut corners.
These are not just jobs that “US workers won’t take.” Migrants work
in nearly all low-paying occupations and have become essential to
the US economy in the age of global competition."